Oliver Stone has been with Black Lives Action Coalition from when it began as New BLAC.
“I got involved with BLAC through my work with F--kRapeCulture, and I knew a lot of people within the Student Union as well,” Stone, a junior studying philosophy and English, said. “We sort of formed BLAC together.”
With several events like the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the Black Lives Matter movement has become more prevalent. That is one of the reasons Stone said BLAC is important.
“In wake of recent events, of Black Lives Matter protests, there needed to be an organization that was able to construct protests and get a lot of groundwork done,” Stone said. “BLAC pretty much formed because of that.”
Last year, some of the events New BLAC organized included hosting a summit to discuss race on campus and setting up a cardboard graveyard to commemorate victims of police brutality, according to previous Post reports.
Stone said BLAC and the Black Lives Matter movement are not losing steam from last year, and the group will continue to work this year toward important goals, such as lobbying for cultural competency programs, which would help people be more aware of racial and ethnic factors on campus.
“They would pretty much be about different ethnic environments and racial and political factors,” he said. “(We’d like) that to become a requirement for certain positions. … It would be modeled on the SafeZone Trainings.”
SafeZone Training at Ohio University is a program in which participants learn more about the LGBT community. The community is one he is deeply invested in, Stone said, citing delfin bautista, director of the LGBT Center at OU who uses they/them pronouns and the lowercase spelling of their name, as someone he would like to follow in the footsteps of.
“I would honestly really like to be like delfin,” Stone said. “And be the director of a multicultural center or an LGBT center. That’s one thing that my activism has taught me. I feel like that would be a great opportunity to help many more people.”
Activism on campus is often misunderstood, Stone said.
“They don’t know the reason or necessity behind it,” Stone said. “The fact of the matter is that our campus has to change for the better. Certain stuff that happens on our campus shouldn’t be happening. We, as activist groups, try to change that.”
Stone said some people who are perhaps part of the problems on campus don’t want to see the changes that activists are trying to achieve and perpetuate a negative view toward them.
“I feel like they’ll misunderstand us or target us because of it,” Stone said.
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Activism is something that has helped Stone become more involved in the world around him, he said.
“I feel like activism is important because if you’re sick and tired of the world being the way it is, you have to change it yourself,” Stone said. “I don’t want to sit down and be like, ‘OK, this is the way things are.’ I want to work toward changing it for the better.”
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tm255312@ohio.edu
